abbreviations, efficient communication, thank chatters

[gusl]

Isn't it great how the Internet has made written language more efficient? I think we have IRC to thank for creating the world's first informal text medium (before the internet, even letters among family members seem unnecessarily formal)

Almost half of the abbreviations I use indicate an epistemic weakening, following the CYA principle:
AFAIK
AFAICT
IIRC
IMHO

Exceptions:
BTW
FYI
IOW
IRL
LOL
WTF
TTYL

I wish English had short ways of pronouncing of IIRC, IMHO, FYI.

I should adopt:
AFAIU: "as far as I understand"
FWIW: "for what it's worth"
IIUC: "If I understand correctly"
ITYM: "I think you mean"
IYKWIM: "if you know what I mean"

Comments

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

I think amateur radio may have accomplished this first
(see for instance http://www.ac6v.com/morseaids.htm search for "prosigns" and looks at the table below) but I think the IRC/IM culture has definitely reached a wider audience, and in any event both are fascinating; that essentially the same reducing pressures act on written language as soon as it starts being used under some of the same circumstances as speech (i.e. used in real time as opposed to the batch composition and reading of email, postal letters)

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

Also, would you call "FWIW" an eptistemic weakening, or something else? It seems clear it's some kind of weakening, but it appears to question the conversational value or relevance of its referent, not its truth.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

teenagers passing notes to each other in class may have predated IRC too. But the population wasn't integrated enough to form its own language (or maybe several little languages, but no standard).

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd call it epistemic. It's definitely a meta-conversational thing.

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

My claim is precisely that amateur radio was integrated enough to form "its own language", at least to the same extent that IRC did. The wikipedia article on Morse Code gives an example of how a substantial part of a conversation can take place entirely inside the conventional 'Q-codes' etc. Of course eventually you have to resort to a "real" language, but this is true of IRC as well.